Factorio Forums

Hello,

I played a little bit with the smart transport belt and noticed an irregularity: The items on the belt are not equidistant. On a full compressed yellow belt, the majority of items are detected 9 ticks after the previous one. But every 25th item on the belt is detected after 8 ticks. See the image for the measurement and the attached save for a live demo.

Yellow belt: 24x 9 ticks, 8 ticks → 25 items per 224 ticks
Red belt: 12x (5 ticks, 4 ticks), 1x 4 ticks ̣→ 50 items per 224 ticks
Blue belt: 74x 3 ticks, 1x 2 ticks → 75 items per 224 ticks
Thanks,
Gerhard

Would that not just mean that there are (24/9 + 1/8)/25 times per tick? I assume the detector does not give out fractions of items having passed?!

The test in inconclusive.
The time distance between compressed items is 8.96 ticks according to your test. Since the signals can only be outputted every integer tick, sometimes it will be 8 ticks, sometimes it will be 9 ticks, resulting in an average of 8.96 ticks. That does not mean that the distance is different.

And even if items are not perfectly equidistant it's not really a problem.

While it is annoying for some setups, it's not a bug.

Edit: I looked at the code and the distance between items is 0.28. 0.28/0.03125 = 8.96
I'm now planning on changing the distance between items to 0.28125. This way the distance between items will be a convenient 9, 4.5, 3 ticks for normal/fast/express belts.

I did this change for Version: 0.13.3 as an experiment.
Hopefully things won't blow up.

Express belts were nerfed from 40.2 items/s to 40 items/s! OMGWTFBBQ!

DaveMcW wrote:OMGWTFBBQ!

I agree, this nerf requires a barbeque to make up for it

DaveMcW wrote:Express belts were nerfed from 40.2 items/s to 40 items/s! OMGWTFBBQ!

man- i'm so happy i've rounded down to 40 for about 9 months now... in most cases the spare capacity from partially used assemblers filled that last .17 i/s anyways.

Thanks for adjusting the item distance!